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You can check out the iOS Device Summary page for more info about the summary plus PDF downloads—including optimized files for printing.

For developers, the iPod touch has been a useful, relatively inexpensive compact device for testing. The previous model was released almost four years ago and sits at the very low end of devices that support iOS 8 and iOS 9. The new sixth generation iPod touch is a welcome addition as a more affordable testing device with a recent 64-bit processor. Like previous generations, the new iPod touch has a 4-inch display, so an iPhone is still needed for on-device testing of larger screen resolutions.

It is interesting to note that every iOS device that Apple currently sells, except the iPhone 5c, has a 64-bit processor.

This also means that if you need to acquire older models for testing iOS 8 and iOS 9, you will need to turn to refurbished or used devices.

Check out the iOS Device Summary page for the rationale behind the summary plus PDF downloads—including optimized files for printing.

Some things to note from WWDC announcements and Apple product lineup changes:

All devices that support iOS 8 will also support iOS 9.

Apps are currently required to support both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. With iOS 9, the App Store will also accept apps that are 64-bit only. This allows developers to limit deployment of an app to more recent devices with faster CPUs and GPUs. The device summary now has a line showing where 32-bit ends and 64-bit begins.

Finally, devices for testing:

At $199, the 16 GB, 5th generation iPod touch is still the most affordable compact iOS 9 device

At $299, the 16 GB, WiFi iPad mini 2 is now the most affordable iOS 9 iPad

As of 6/19/15, the original iPad mini is discontinued—try used and refurbished devices for low-end iPad testing.

Last fall, I posted A Brief History of Apple Home Page Tabs which showed a visual history of each change in the tabs on the apple.com home page since they were introduced in January 2001. That post also called out some of the major changes and common themes in both interface style and products over the years.

On June 8th, 2015, about 9 months after the previous change, the Apple home page tabs have changed again.

Click for the full-sized image.

With the introduction of the Apple Music service, the iPod and iTunes tabs have been replaced with a single Music tab.

The Apple home page has had iTunes and iPod in a tab for almost twelve years. The iTunes tab first appeared in September 2003 with iPod being added for a combined iPod + iTunes tab the very next month in October 2003.

They shared a tab together for close to a decade before being broken out into separate tabs in March 2010, where they have remained until being combined into a single Music tab last week.

A Music tab on the Apple home page is not entirely new, nor is the term Apple Music. A Music tab first appeared at the introduction of the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003.* In addition, posters commemorating the launch listed the site address AppleMusic.com.

That tab lasted until September 2003, when it changed to an iTunes tab. Time will tell if the Music tab and the Apple Music brand hang in there longer this time around. •

*The original post listed the addition of the original Music tab in May 2003, which is the earliest archive I found in the Internet Wayback Machine. However, this change almost certainly went live on the day the iTunes Music Store was introduced on April 28th, 2003.

I’ll be doing a few things next week at WWDC and wanted to pass along my schedule. Hope to see you at one or more of these happenings!

Monday: NeXTEVNT Fundraiser for the Cartoon Art Museum

I’ll be doing a short set of James Dempsey and the Breakpoints songs at this fundraising event at the Cartoon Art Museum.

This event has been a lot of fun each year, always with great speakers and plenty of time to meet and mingle with very interesting folks. If you are a fan of comics, cartoons, or animation — or have an interest in where the technology we use every day comes from — this is a great event for a great cause.

Wednesday: LIVE near WWDC 2015 (aka The Big Show!)

Our LIVE near WWDC show is the biggest James Dempsey and the Breakpoints performance of the year — and this year’s show is our biggest ever. Thanks to our fabulous sponsors, we’re at a bigger venue and the drinks are on us!

The event is free, but registration is required. We are handling admission the way AltConf does. Registration does not guarantee admission. For general admission registrations, we will fill the venue on a first come, first admitted basis.

Friday: Closing session at AltConf 2015

I’ll be closing out the week at AltConf 2015 again this year with an easy-going look back at the announcements of WWDC 2015 and their possible implications in a session entitled So, That Just Happened.

This session is a talk about the week in review and not a set of James Dempsey and the Breakpoints songs.

Last fall, I received an email that read, “I would like to invite you to be a speaker at NSConference 7”.

In the invitation email, conference organizer Steve ‘Scotty’ Scott (@macdevnet) described his intent for the conference:

“At NSConference I want the speakers to be with the attendees all the time. I want you to be at the sessions, I want you to be at the meals, I want you to be at the events. I want you to mix, eat, drink and chat with as many attendees as possible.”

“What I require most in an NSConference speaker is enthusiasm and a love of being with the OS X and iOS developer community. Right now I am not looking to pick talk topics, as it’s all about people first.”

I accepted the invitation immediately.

All About People First

In his opening remarks, Scotty expressed the same intent in a different fashion. He said that the speakers and topics were, of course, important, but the real heart of NSConf was creating an environment where members of the developer community could interact.

Leicester Athena Photo by NotFromUtrecht via Wikimedia Commons

The format at NSConf was unlike other conferences I have attended. Each segment began with a 30-minute talk followed by two 10 or 15-minute blitz-talks, followed by a 30-minute break. This approach packed three topics plus plenty of time to talk with fellow attendees into a 90-minute block.

The venue was the Leicester Athena, a gorgeous 1930s art deco theater re-styled to host events. The seating was at round tables, giving folks a chance to talk with one another. There was a massive stage with great lighting and sound (and yes, a full bar on stage too). It is truly a beautiful venue, well-suited to Scotty’s goals for the event.

The days were filled with speakers giving talks, conversations with attendees and lots of coffee and tea. In the evenings, good food and more conversation. The first night was the banquet, each table set with a candelabra, with wine and a meal served at your table. The second night was the party, with a buffet meal and mingling.

It was after folks had a chance to be fed at the party that we launched into our Breakpoint Jam.

Breakpoint Jam: NSConf Edition

The idea behind a Breakpoint Jam is that the band is made up of whoever happens to be in town for a conference. Folks practice up some James Dempsey and the Breakpoints songs on their own before arriving, we do a quick rehearsal the day of the show, and then we perform.

I find the most stress-inducing shows are when all the musicians are new to the Breakpoint Jam — this was one of those performances.

It takes a leap of faith to get on a plane in San Francisco and fly over 5,000 miles to England, knowing you will be performing for a theater full of people with musicians you have never performed with, rehearsed with, or in some cases even met before.

That leap of faith was rewarded by musicians that pulled it all together amazingly well in the rehearsal time allotted.

Guitarist and iOS developer Kevin Cupp (@kevincupp) did perhaps the best walk-on guitar part in Breakpoint Jam history, having learned every nuance from the rehearsal tracks I had sent.

Longtime NeXT and Apple indie developer John Fox (@djembe) added a full drum kit to a Breakpoint Jam for the first time, skillfully playing the varying musical styles from the driving beat of Goto Fail to the Hawaiian breeze-inspired Liki Song.

Rounding out the core trio of Conditional Breakpoints for the evening was NSConf’s own Scotty on bass. (It is no coincidence that Scotty was positioned closest to the on-stage bar.)

For The Liki Song, backup singers arrived in the form of Laura Savino (@savinola) and Ruotger Deecke (@roddi) making their Breakpoint Jam debut, and Uli Kusterer (@uliwitness) whose bass voice is perfect for the ‘object alloc’ chant beneath the choruses.

It was tremendous fun to play on that big stage, in that beautiful theater, complete with lighting effects (and a fog machine, I think). The show was only possible because of all of those who joined in the jam—a big thank you to them for lending their talents to the show. And of course, a giant thank you to everyone the audience, it was a privilege to play for you all.

The Future: A Look Back

Scotty had stated that this year’s NSConference would be the last. When I looked at the schedule, I saw that Scotty had chosen my session The Future: A Look Back to be the last talk of the last day of the last NSConf.

The talk took a look back to the Apple/NeXT merger and the history of some of the technologies that we use today. After the talk, some old-timers told me that they enjoyed the walk down memory lane, while some more recent arrivals to iOS and OS X development commented they appreciated hearing some backstory on the technologies they are using today.

The Future: A Look Back at NSConf 7Photo by Raphael Sebbe

Scotty had also announced that, although this was the final NSConf, he hoped to do another event in the future that took the best of NSConf, but proceeded in a different way — different enough that calling it ‘NSConf’ would be misnomer.

With that in mind, I closed my talk as follows:

“As we wind down to the last session of the last NSConf, I’d remind you that in this developer world of ours, nothing is ever truly gone. Specific implementations come and go, particular instances are created and released, but the underlying themes stick around. That’s true whether we are talking about technologies, or the community of people that use them to create magnificent things.”

Almost Like Being There

Being at NSConf was a fantastic experience — I learned a lot and had the chance to meet and get to know people I would likely not have met otherwise.

I’m very grateful to Scotty for inviting me and to the entire conference team for doing a fantastic job and for treating the attendees and speakers very well. NSConf had an easy-going feel, but everything hit its mark. It takes a great team to make it look that easy.

The next best thing to being there would be watching the amazing talks. And as of last week they are available to everyone on the NSConf 7 channel on Vimeo. I encourage you to check out all the talks, including my talk The Future: A Look Back, which I’ve included below. •

Our team is hard at work in Palo Alto, CA, building out the future of the cloud. We can‘t wait to tell you more, but right now we‘re working very quietly. Some really great engineers and designers who‘ve built some of the world‘s most successful products are already here.

Even though I’m now at a stealth mode startup, I’m not dropping completely out of sight.

I’ll still be speaking at conferences and James Dempsey and the Breakpoints will continue performing and writing new songs whenever inspiration strikes.

In fact, I’m gearing up for a spring tour that starts in England and then criss-crosses the USA. At each stop I’ll be speaking and performing in a Breakpoint Jam — a set of songs from our iTunes chart-topping album Backtrace.

Last week I posted about BuildSettingExtractor, a utility that makes it easy to pull the build settings out of an Xcode project file and into xcconfig build configuration files. (The post also mentions some xcconfig file benefits with links to ‘how to’ information. Read the earlier post here.)

I also wanted BuildSettingExtractor to be useful for anyone who wants to learn more about the build settings in their projects. To that end, the latest version, available on github, generates build setting descriptions gleaned from the installed version of Xcode.

For example:

// Framework Search Paths
//
// This is a list of paths to folders containing frameworks to be
// searched by the compiler for both included or imported header
// files when compiling C, Objective-C, C++, or Objective-C++, and by
// the linker for frameworks used by the product. Paths are delimited
// by whitespace, so any paths with spaces in them need to be
// properly quoted. [-F]
FRAMEWORK_SEARCH_PATHS = $(DEVELOPER_FRAMEWORKS_DIR) $(inherited)
// Info.plist File
//
// This is the project-relative path to the plist file that contains
// the Info.plist information used by bundles.
INFOPLIST_FILE = BuildSettingExtractorTests/BuildSettingExtractorTests-Info.plist

Inline Build Setting Info

To learn more about build settings, Apple provides the Build Setting Reference (Apple developer documentation links are notoriously fragile, just search for the document) as well as Quick Help in Xcode when a build setting is selected. (In Xcode choose View > Utilities > Show Quick Help Inspector (Cmd-Opt-2))

In addition to these ways of learning more, BuildSettingExtractor gleans the build setting info from Xcode and puts it inline in the generated xcconfig files. This has a few benefits:

Read about each build setting without selecting setting one by one in Xcode

Read about only the build settings currently set in your project and targets

Information about build settings is available wherever you are looking at the xcconfig file: github, text editors, diff tools, etc.

What if I don’t want this lovely but verbose feature?

If you want BuildSettingExtractor to generate pithy xcconfig files without the build setting info, Choose BuildSettingExtractor > Preferences… (Command-,) for the new preferences sheet and turn it off.

As for the call for help, if you would like to help out with a basic app icon for BuildSettingExtractor, the utility can emerge from the primordial world of the generic app icon. Contact me if you are interested. •

Using build configuration files—or xcconfig files as they are known—has some definite benefits. However, as seen in the screencast, the initial process of copying the current build settings out of an Xcode project into xcconfig files is tedious and potentially error-prone.

The app is a simple droplet utility: drop an xcodeproj file on it, choose a destination folder, BuildSettingExtractor will extract the build settings from the project and generate xcconfig files.

A set of files is generated for each target in the project and for the project itself. Each set of files includes one xcconfig file per build configuration and one xcconfig file of shared settings. For example, a typical Xcode project will generate nine xcconfig files: three sets of files for the app target, test target, and project with three files for Debug, Release and Shared in each set.

I hope you find BuildSettingExtractor useful. Even if you are just curious about project build settings, this is an easy way to inspect a project’s build settings without fear of accidentally changing them.

A little more about xcconfig files

By default, Xcode stores all build configuration settings in the project file itself. However, you can tell Xcode to base a build configuration’s settings on a build configuration file instead.

A build configuration file is a text file of key-value pairs. An xcconfig file can also contain comments and include other xcconfig files.

//
// Project-Debug.xcconfig
//
#include "Project-Shared.xcconfig” // Include other xcconfig files
// An xcconfig file is a text file of key-value pairs.
// Use comments to record why you are using certain build values.
// The /*comment*/ and #comment styles are not valid in an xcconfig file.
COPY_PHASE_STRIP = NO
GCC_DYNAMIC_NO_PIC = NO
GCC_OPTIMIZATION_LEVEL = 0
GCC_PREPROCESSOR_DEFINITIONS = DEBUG=1 $(inherited)
GCC_SYMBOLS_PRIVATE_EXTERN = NO
MTL_ENABLE_DEBUG_INFO = YES
ONLY_ACTIVE_ARCH = YES

There are some benefits to using xcconfig files:

Build settings are not in project file—this removes one source of project file merge conflicts

Build settings can be documented using comments

An xcconfig file of shared settings can be included in each build configuration

There are also potential drawbacks to using xcconfig files. One potential pitfall is that the build settings for a configuration are based on the xcconfig file—but settings set in Xcode override the xcconfig file settings. This can leave you with unexpected build behavior because an errant build setting set in Xcode is overriding the xcconfig file setting.

This issue is compounded by the fact that when new Xcode versions update project settings, the settings are added to the project, not to an xcconfig file. So when using xcconfig files, some vigilance is required to keep an eye out for build settings being added to the project. These stray build settings should be moved from the project to the appropriate xcconfig file.

What Next?

BuildSettingExtractor generates xcconfig files from a project—it does not set your project up to use them. Here are few resources that walk through that process:

I was inspired to release BuildSettingExtractor by Episode #154 of NSScreencast. The episode is a step by step demo walking through the process.

By the way, if you aren’t familiar with NSScreencast, I recommend taking a look. Ben Scheirman (@subdigital) presents weekly bite-sized screencasts covering a wide range of development topics. Some screencasts are free and some, like Episode #154, require a subscription. (Ben also plays guitar with James Dempsey and the Breakpoints, but that has yet to be the subject of a screencast.)

The response to Backtrace has been fantastic, and I wanted to thank everyone who has shown their support by purchasing the album and helping to spread the word. You made Backtrace the #1 comedy album on iTunes in the US, UK, and Canada. You also made it debut at #5 on the Billboard Comedy Album Chart. I cannot thank you all enough!

Since releasing Backtrace last month, I’ve gotten numerous requests for the lyrics to the songs.

For the rest of November, I’ll post lyrics to a song a day (or thereabouts) and we’ll make our way through the album. I’ll be tweeting when each song page goes live as well as some of my favorite lyrics. You can follow me at @jamesdempsey .

Each song page contains its liner notes—lyrics, song notes, and full credits for the very talented people who brought these songs to life. Below are links to the liner notes for each song – each link will go live as Lyrical November progresses.

And of course, If you haven’t checked out Backtrace on iTunes, I invite you to give it a listen.

Check out the iOS Device Summary page for the rationale behind the summary as well as PDF downloads—including optimized files for printing.

The new iOS devices introduced this fall presented some challenges for the summary chart:

The iPad mini 2 and iPad mini 3 have identical processors and screens. The devices appear on the chart as a single entry, split to reflect the different supported OS versions.

We have not seen a revised iPod touch in two years. With the traditional Apple fall events behind us, it is unlikely we will see a significant update until next fall at the earliest. Since the iPod touch line ends at the A5 chip and the multiple-model iPhones start at the A6 chip, these have been combined into a single row.

Finally, the new A8X chip pushes the number of columns to the limit, so I’ve dropped the ARM chip and the iPhone 3GS and 3rd Generation iPod touch from the chart.

Since the chart is starting to have trouble cleanly representing devices on a single page, I am looking at more dynamic ways of presenting this information in the future.

Until then, I hope you find this version of the summary chart helpful. •

Check out the iOS Device Summary page to learn more and download printable PDFs of the summary.

And check out Backtrace, the only album of iOS and Mac development tunes ever on the Billboard charts.